The Damnation of Theron Ware eBook

The Rev. Theron Ware uncrossed his feet and moved
out on to the stoop beside his wife. “What’s
that you say?” he interjected. “Don’t
they take milk on Sundays?”

“Nope!” answered the boy.

The young couple looked each other in the face for
a puzzled moment, then broke into a laugh.

“Well, we’ll try it, anyway,” said
the preacher. “You can go on bringing it
Sundays till—­till—­”

“Till you cave in an’ tell me to stop,”
put in the boy. “All right!” and
he was off on the instant, the dipper jangling loud
incredulity in his pail as he went.

The Wares exchanged another glance as he disappeared
round the corner of the house, and another mutual
laugh seemed imminent. Then the wife’s
face clouded over, and she thrust her under-lip a trifle
forward out of its place in the straight and gently
firm profile.

“It’s just what Wendell Phillips said,”
she declared. “’The Puritan’s idea
of hell is a place where everybody has to mind his
own business.’”

The young minister stroked his chin thoughtfully,
and let his gaze wander over the backyard in silence.
The garden parts had not been spaded up, but lay,
a useless stretch of muddy earth, broken only by last
year’s cabbage-stumps and the general litter
of dead roots and vegetation. The door of the
tenantless chicken-coop hung wide open. Before
it was a great heap of ashes and cinders, soaked into
grimy hardness by the recent spring rains, and nearer
still an ancient chopping-block, round which were
scattered old weather-beaten hardwood knots which
had defied the axe, parts of broken barrels and packing-boxes,
and a nameless debris of tin cans, clam-shells, and
general rubbish. It was pleasanter to lift the
eyes, and look across the neighbors’ fences
to the green, waving tops of the elms on the street
beyond. How lofty and beautiful they were in the
morning sunlight, and with what matchless charm came
the song of the robins, freshly installed in their
haunts among the new pale-green leaves! Above
them, in the fresh, scented air, glowed the great
blue dome, radiant with light and the purification
of spring.

Theron lifted his thin, long-fingered hand, and passed
it in a slow arch of movement to comprehend this glorious
upper picture.

“What matter anyone’s ideas of hell,”
he said, in soft, grave tones, “when we have
that to look at, and listen to, and fill our lungs
with? It seems to me that we never feel
quite so sure of God’s goodness at other times
as we do in these wonderful new mornings of spring.”

The wife followed his gesture, and her eyes rested
for a brief moment, with pleased interest, upon the
trees and the sky. Then they reverted, with a
harsher scrutiny, to the immediate foreground.